


i could be bound to one second and count myself king of infinite time

by LaughingStones



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Bro is older-Dirk but not obviously so, Brotherly Bonding, Comfort after nightmares, Everyone Is Alive, Gen, I don't even know how to write Striders, Nightmares, Post-Sburb/Sgrub, Second Person Present Tense, Strider Feels, What am I doing, Yet here they are, Young Dirk is around but not here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-08
Updated: 2014-10-08
Packaged: 2018-02-20 10:38:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2425670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LaughingStones/pseuds/LaughingStones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Since you got out of the game three weeks ago, a lot of things are subtly different.  Or not at all subtly, sometimes, like the addition of two entire new sentient species sharing the planet with humans, but whatever.  Bro shouldn't be aware of the difference, should he?</p>
<p>-----<br/>Dave has nightmares, but everything's okay.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i could be bound to one second and count myself king of infinite time

You wake with a rising wavering moan in your ears and realize you were trying to scream in your sleep again. The nightmare was stupid, you're sure, this kind always are when you think about them later - who the fuck cares if someone comes out of that doorway before you can close the door? - but right now you're shaking and freaked the hell out and it isn't stupid at all, it's fucking terrifying. You try to slow your breathing and realize by the way it catches and shakes in your throat that you're crying. Goddammit, that is so uncool it could be in the middle of the sun, it's making volcanoes jealous except that it is also the opposite of hot, fuck you're so out of it you can't even metaphor properly.

Pushing yourself up to sit, you scrub a hand over your face. You will not wrap your arms around yourself, that's just dumb.

The door opens without warning and you scramble for your shades for more reasons than usual as Bro flips on your light. Fuck fuck fuck, he heard you, did you wake him?

"What the fuck, Bro, knock, grown man in here, I need my goddamn privacy - and what is with the lights, it's the middle of the fucking night!" You're squinting a little even behind the dark lenses, one hand up to shield your face as you try to adjust to the glare.

"Yeah? You planning on going back to sleep anytime soon?" He leans in the doorway fully-dressed, and the hair sticking out from under his cap is as spiky as usual, not crushed and bent, so you're guessing he hadn't gone to bed yet. There's that, anyway.

You run a hand through your own hair, wondering if your face looks normal or if it's obvious how off-kilter you feel. "Eh, maybe, maybe not. Been thinking of going nocturnal, you know, this whole diurnal thing is too fucking mainstream, gotta switch it up, shake people's complacency, make them realize trolls aren't the only ones can go back and forth at will, humans too can be creatures of the night - " Cutting yourself off, you bite back a grimace. Creatures of the night? That's terrible, so overplayed it's not even ironically bad anymore, you are so off your game.

Bro just nods, cruising into your room with his thumbs hooked in his jean pockets, looking around like your posters are suddenly new to him. (Some of them are new to you, like The Drones and DJ Spades, who gets stabbingly vicious in his rap battles - you looked him up online. (He seemed weirdly familiar somehow.) Since you got out of the game three weeks ago, a lot of things are subtly different. Or not at all subtly, sometimes, like the addition of two entire new sentient species sharing the planet with humans, but whatever. Bro shouldn't be aware of the difference, should he?) He glances over at you, jerks his head.

"C'mon, up."

Blowing out a breath, you rub your face, sliding fingers under your shades to surreptitiously get the sticky salt off your lashes. "No strife, Bro, I am not up for that right now."

He snorts. "And you look all fresh and ready, too. Nah. C'mere."

Warily, you roll out of bed and approach in your boxers and the "I'm a Pretty Princess" t-shirt you sleep in. When you get close enough, he reaches out with one half-gloved hand slow enough to telegraph his moves, grabs you by the back of the neck and steps in, pressing your head against his shoulder (you're only like half a head shorter than him now and even after weeks it still takes you by surprise). His other hand stays at his pocket, which is good because this is just short of where you'd lose it completely.

Bro is hugging you. He hasn't done that in years, not since you were ten and flash-stepped successfully for the first time, right into his sword. (He was wrecked even though he'd somehow moved enough to keep it a shallow cut, and seeing him like that was scarier than the pain.)

You turn your head a little, breathe him in, the familiar scent of the women's herbal shampoo he uses, the spice of his deodorant, the slight plastic-y smell of whatever project he was working on this late at night, and under it all warm skin and sweat and Bro. (He's alive. He's _alive_.)

Deep breathing, don't lose it, keep the fragments of cool you have left. If you have to blink a lot for a minute, he can't see behind your shades, and your breathing is steady, so -

"Bad, huh?" he says quietly.

That's... not how this is supposed to work. You act as laid-back and chill as if you're not about to go careening off the handle into an overextended metaphor, a metaphor that has way too much on its plate, a metaphor that agreed to attend PTA meetings but didn't realize that would conflict with the evening part-time job, because this metaphor is a young single dad trying to be a good parent while keeping food on the table and sometimes it's hard. It's hard, and... Yeah, anyway, you do your part and he's supposed to let you get away with it. This apparent shift in the Strider code was not checked with you before approval, and you're not sure how to respond.

"...Eh." You sort of twitch one shoulder.

His chest expands for longer than usual and you realize he's taking a deep breath, like he needs to steel himself for something. What the fuck?

"Not me, was it?"

At first you don't understand. He can't be choosing now to be concerned about the bizarre effects his puppets may have had on your delicate, impressionable young subconscious, especially since Lil Cal doesn't exist anymore. "What, were you putting subliminal messages in Sawtooth's raps again? Cuz otherwise I don't think you're giving me weird dreams, Bro - "

"No, you little dick, were they about me. Like, the time - the time I died."

Holy shit. You can't breathe, your throat is locked up, you're frozen. Holy shit, he remembers, you had no idea he remembered. Suddenly your hands are on his back, digging into his polo shirt, clinging. Your breath hitches and shudders, you're shaking against him, your cheek pressed hard against his shoulder.

His hand is on your head, the other hand on your back holding you to him. "Sorry, lil bro," he's muttering into your hair, "hated fucking leaving you like that, just a kid, but the fucker transformed in the middle of the fight and phase two was a beast. I knew you'd be okay, hell, the orange sprite kid did hella good up until the phase shift, and he was you too - "

He falls silent abruptly, hands gone hard and still. Then he's scrabbling at the back of your shirt, hauling it up, shoving you away by one shoulder so you turn half away from him, and you always hated when he got peremptory like this but this time it's different because his hands are shaking. He feels across the skin of your back like he can't trust his eyes, rubs at the middle of your spine where a faint ghost memory tells you the sword stabbed through your sprite self and hurt like your own shitty katana never did because it was (prototyped that way) supposed to be there.

"It didn't transfer," you say, "I don't have a scar in front either."

His hands still. "But you remember."

You shrug a casual shoulder and shiver, which kind of diminishes the "totally chill and untraumatized by all alter-self experiences including deaths, injuries, watching other people die, etc, et fucking cetera" effect you were going for.

"Shit, lil bro." He tugs your shirt back down and looks at you, pulls you in again. You don't really know what to do with your hands; hugs have never been a thing before except the ironic manly side-grab and noogie or tussle, is the coolness amnesty still on? It has to be, Bro's always been the arbiter of cool, and he is holding on like you'll vaporize if he doesn't. You put your hands on his back and just breathe.

You've dreamed about his death plenty of times, of course, in the game and since, intermingled with your various demises and everyone else's, it just happens that you also have ordinary nightmares, like tonight's. This kind is easier to deal with; the fucked up feelings may linger, but at least you don't have _issues_ about, like, doors and hallways to deal with on top of that, unlike people dying. It's the ones that mix what happened with the bizarre subconscious shit that really fuck you over for days. The times you dream you're still in the game (constantly, you heard once dreams run several months behind and you sure haven't drempt yet that you're out), and you find out that Bro actually lived. And then you get to watch as Jack Noir appears behind him, and you're trying to jump back in time just far enough to save him but you can't remember how, you keep missing the moment and getting there just too late, again and again until you wake yourself trying. You maybe cling a little, thinking of that.

"Are you okay," he says into your hair, low-voiced and intense.

You attempt a casual shrug x 2 combo, swallow to make sure your voice comes out okay. "Man, I ascended to God-tier, I'm the fucking Knight of Time, I'm so far beyond okay it hasn't seen me in years. It sends me plaintive notes at Christmas asking for money and I don't even bother to answer, I'm moving up in the world, I don't give a fuck about the little people anymore."

Oh, turns out it was a fail x 2 combo. "Evading the fucking question."

You purse your lips although he can't see it, scowl a bit over his shoulder. "Are you?" you counter.

He's silent for a while, which is unnerving, Bro's as snappy with the comebacks as you are, but you assume he's just not going to answer you.

"Not sure," he says eventually, and you. You don't know what. Where is this place the two of you are even at? That's not, you can't remember him ever admitting to uncertainty in your life. "Spent a week wondering if I'd finally lost it, I got these double memories. Like, I know when I was a kid, I hung out with this rustblood all the time and she showed me some useful shit. And I know that chick was a totally human Latina girl, and there were no fucking trolls or carapacians until a while ago when the world rebooted or whatever."

"Huh," you say. You don't have that problem. You know what this version of your life was supposedly like, but it's more like information you can access than real memories or even ghost ones. It's pretty weird the way things translated, like instead of spending the last three years on a meteor, you apparently spent them at a fucking tiny private boarding school where both humans and trolls are accepted. According to the not-memories, roughly half the student body was made up of your human and troll friends, hatefriends, and acquaintances from the game.

"You?" he says pointedly.

You breathe a minute. "Everyone made it out," you say. "Karkles, John, Terezi..." Rose and Kanaya, Jade, even the other set of kids like John's teenage mom - grandma, whatever - and teenage Bro. (You try not to think about that.) Hell, even the creepy juggalo's around, apparently, which is not actually comforting, but he's supposedly reformed now he's not being mind-controlled anymore. "Everyone's alive. Sure, we'll probably have some mad weird trauma for a while, but things are okay, we're pretty much good. I'm good."

He must hear in your voice that you believe what you're saying, because slowly you feel the tension in his body give and go loose. He raises a hand to ruffle your hair and then the two of you casually detach, like what? that wasn't awkward or unusual, all is normal and copacetic and chill.

"Think you'll go back to sleep?"

"Nah. Might fuck around online for a while."

"Eh, you can do that anytime. _Swet Brro nd Hellas Jfef: th Mvioe_ is streaming on Netflix. Wanna come watch?"

(Weird again, because that was your comic, it was, but now it's a TV series and a major blockbuster movie, and of course if Bro and teenage Bro are both here, so are you and... grown-up you. It is still hella fucking weird.)

You'd be offended, like he thinks he's gotta keep an eye on you, make sure you don't break down or something, except there's something careful in the tilt of his head. He wants to keep an eye on you, maybe, but not because you're going to break. Because half his memories might say you've been away at boarding school, so it's his own fault you've become almost unfamiliar, but the other half know he was dead and left you to figure shit out on your own. Either way, you don't quite know each other anymore, and he wants to fix it.

For the first time this night you manage a properly casual shrug. "Sure. Gotta appreciate true genius, right?" The two of you share a deadpan look through your shades and you go out to the living room together.

(You slouch against each other on the futon and snark and mimic Jeff's slurring accent, and after the movie you play Mad Snacks Yo on two-player, which is hilariously broken, and Bro spins his character around and around the lamppost he's become lodged in. The blue light from the TV shines on his face, on the softening that is a smile hidden in one corner of his mouth, gleams off his pointy shades, and you close your eyes and sleep.)


End file.
